However I've spent money on 144Hz monitors and for enough performance that the games I play run on at least constant 120 fps. Obviously it's not necessary if you are in it just for a story, but as mentioned in another post I exclusively play multiplayer games with my friends and if you haven't experienced playing games (or even just using a computer) with 144Hz (running at or higher frame rate) it's like a night and day.
I stay away from DRMed platforms, so incumbent consoles are no go for me.
About higher framerates - it should be OK, once AMD will merge FreeSync support in amdgpu driver upstream. My monitor is 60Hz anyway, but to have good experience without tearing on high frequency monitors, FreeSync can help. Today, to use it you'd need to install customized kernel from AMD.
>I stay away from DRMed platforms
I am not ideologically bound, I care about performance. If Linux is enough for you then more power to you, I wish it could be enough for me too.
If you care about performance, you'd stay away from consoles anyway. They are way too limited in comparison.
So I don't agree that Linux is much behind technically. Smaller market share is more of an issue.
As long as Linux is just sort of viable there won't be wide adoption, because why would you change everything about your computing life for something that's +/-0% gain. Even at 10% better experience you might have to consider hard if changing over is worth the effort. Linux needs to magically become superior in many ways for people to hope on board in large numbers.
It's recent, so its usage is gradually growing. Unity engine now supports it, with Unreal and Cry on the way. Once major engines will have it, it will implicitly be used in much larger numbers.
Yes, but we were talking about Linux's popularity as a gaming platform, and why it's not more widespread, and that's not an issue the huge majority of gamers share -- so they'd rather use a console.
You get near native performance in a VM, the downside being it's a little tricky to set up and you won't be able to use your 970 in Linux.
However, it's more than good enough for many games already, and Linux gaming keeps improving and growing. And not all games need super performance.
I can get around 40-50 fps in the Witcher 3 in Wine on Linux on max settings (minus hairworks), using AMD RX 480 at 1920x1200. Is that acceptable performance? It's somewhat lower than it would get on Windows on the same hardware, but it's pretty playable. More critical are rendering bugs that Wine developers are still working on.